The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for facetting a metallized polyvinyl chloride (PVC) strip and processing the facetted strip into facetted tinsel icicles packaged for retail display.
The prior art includes tinsel which is unfacetted and prepared from metallized PVC strips. The inventors desired, however, to produce facetted PVC tinsel icicles which would be more attractive than conventional tinsel icicles and to develop a method and apparatus for efficiently manufacturing such facetted tinsel icicles and for readily and inexpensively displaying them for sale.
Prior attempts to develop a facetting technique for manufacturing PVC tinsel strips have proven unsatisfactory. Such attempts have involved pre-facetting the PVC strip, rolling it on a reel and then feeding this material through a conventional cutting and slitting machine to make tinsel. This technique was found to be unsatisfactory because the tension applied in re-rolling the facetted strip onto a supply reel smoothed out the crimping or facetting folds and substantially eliminated the facetted appearance of the strip. Rolling the pre-facetted strip more loosely on the supply reel did not solve the problem since the loosely wound supply reel would not feed the slitter device properly.